March 2017

03/30/2017

I've been feeling a bit languid this evening. One of the things that I've been doing instead of the editing that I should have been doing is looking at pieces of art on Wikipedia. It is fitting that today is the anniversary of Vincent van Gough's birth. However, despite the occasion, I have not been looking at van Gough's art, but mostly art from the Danish Golden Age and the German Romantic Period.

03/28/2017

Boxing and canoeing are more energy-sapping, though less accessible. According to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association, 48m Americans pulled on their running shoes in 2015 (the country has a similar proportion of joggers to Australia, with Britain trailing). By contrast, just 5m Americans strapped on a pair of boxing gloves.

Of course, I'd first suggest either Muay Thai or Brazilian jiu-jitsu. However, traditional boxing has certainly been proving itself as a wonderful crucible for learning many of the basic principles of combat sports and of fighting in general, one only need ask Cody Garbrandt or Conor McGregor.

03/27/2017

This sociability… or this Care of maintaining Society in a Manner conformable to the Light of human reason Understanding, is the Fountain of Right, properly so called; to which belongs the Abstaining from that which is another’s…-Hugo Grotius, On the Rights of War and Peace

The Economist has recently had a double book-review of Roger Scruton’s On Human Nature and Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option. Both books deal with the problems that, say, a reader of Fr. Z’s WDTPRS have with the modern world we live in. In the book review, The Economist characterizes liberalism’s ascendancy as follows:

It was a liberal achievement to push faith and private morality out of politics. Cultural conservatism would put them back. These two books suggest how hard that is to bring off in a liberal society. Liberals can raise one cheer, not more. On Human Nature shows the difficulties of matching political camps with those of faith and morality.

I think that this statement isn’t exactly right. Talking merely about “faith and private morality” makes it all too easy for a modernist to believe that liberalism is simply an anti-clerical creed and that, once a nation had done away with Christian private morality, that the state can finally start to look after, for a lack of a better term, public morality. From this point of view, it is wrong for a state to take measures to preach Christianity, but right for the state to take measures to fight inequality. After all, whereas Christianity is a matter of faith and private morality, inequality is a public evil that the state can legitimately fight against. Ditto for it being wrong for the state to ban contraception as a matter of faith and private morality, but right for the state to subsidize it in order to promote women’s flourishing.

To avoid these errors, I think it is better to look at liberalism as arguing that the coercive powers of the state should only be applied towards man’s lower nature. Here, we can trace the history of liberalism from the proto-liberal ideas of Hugo Grotius in Mare Liberum, to the Scottish Enlightenment thought of David Hume and Adam Smith, to John Stuart Mill, onto Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek et certera. (I pray readers will forgive me for not mentioning their own favorite thinkers decorating the tree of liberal thought!)

Liberalism’s victory is a victory of placing the higher ideals of human nature in a private sphere in which people are free to pursue those ideals, but they cannot arrogate for themselves the authority to impose those ideals upon other people. The difference isn’t between ‘private morality’ and some other thing, but between the animal nature we all need to sustain in order to live and then the higher ideals we seek in our pursuit of virtue and human flourishing. To borrow a metaphor from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, the rule of law defines the grammar by which people can pursue the higher ideals of human nature, but it cannot tell people what ideals to compose with their lives.

This is essentially John Stuart Mill’s line of argument in On Liberty: Let the state exercise it’s powers of coercion only where it is necessary to prevent harm to another. ‘Harm’ here is clearly understood in terms of the animal properties of another human being, not in terms of the higher properties. It is not defined by another blaspheming or by posting sexist memes, both activities that might offend somebody’s higher ideals, that one person harms another, it is by striking him or by imposing laws that might impede his liberty through the threat of violence.

03/26/2017

Today is the 190th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s death on March 26, 1827. To note the anniversary, I include my favorite piece from Beethoven’s corpus, the 5th Piano Concerto Emperor, below. I wish that I knew more about music so that I could put my admiration of Emperor into words, so that I could identify what exactly about the sound I most admire and find the most beauty in.

Alas, such vertsehen is denied to me. All is not lost, though. In his “Meno” dialogue, Plato inquired into how one can inquire into what one does not know, for how could there be a search for the truth if the searcher does not know what to look for? In the case of my ignorance of music’s form, I can at least recognize beauty. And that is certainly something this search can know what he is looking for!

In his biography, Beethoven: Biography of a Genius, George Marik (1969:424-5), includes some of the notes that Beethoven wrote to himself:

“Occupation is the best thing for not thinking of my malady.”

“Don’t continue my present every-day life! Art demands even that sacrifice. Find rest through diversion, so that I may work more potently in art.”

“Everything which might be called ‘life’ should be devoted to the sublime and be a sanctuary for art!”

“Portraits of Handel, Bach, Bluck, Haydn in my room—they can help to teach me endurance.”

03/22/2017

If there is one benefit that the Trump Administration has brought to the United States, it has been the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to fill the late Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court. For better and for worse, Mr. Gorsuch’s nomination has provided the opportunity for commentators to discuss the late Supreme-Court justice’s judicial philosophy of originalism. Over at Vox, Sean Illing has argued that Scalia’s originalism was less a purely judicial philosophy and more a wider political ideology:

Scalia’s philosophy is hard to square with the reality of the constitutional debate. The implication is that the meaning and intent of the framers is perfectly clear, and that judges should adhere rigidly to that.

Mr. Illing goes on to quote Barack Obama’s Audacity of Hope’s discussion of this aspect of legal philosophy:

Anyone like Justice Scalia, looking to resolve our modern constitutional dispute through strict construction, has one big problem: The founders themselves disagreed profoundly, vehemently, on the meaning of their masterpiece. Before the ink on the constitutional parchment was dry, arguments had erupted not just about minor provisions, but about first principles; not just between peripheral figures, but within the revolution’s very core.

I must admit that I find it difficult to charitably reproduce the argument that, because there was disagreement when a law was written, that something was agreed to when the ink was put to paper, that the written law therefore does not contain some resolution or synthesis of that disagreement.

As a Catholic, I am reminded here of canon law. Canon law is the internal ecclesiastical law that governs the Roman Catholic Church, derived from Roman law, and it is the longest continually legal system in all of Western civilization. Canon law states (749§2) that: “The college of bishops also possesses infallibility in teaching when the bishops gathered together in an ecumenical council exercise the magisterium as teachers and judges of faith and morals who declare for the universal Church that a doctrine of faith or morals is to be held definitively…” However, anybody who has a bit of knowledge about the Catholic Church knows that ecumenical councils, although they promulgated written dogma, scarcely ever settled conflict in the generation in which those debates raged. One need only examine how long, say, the Arian controversy lasted after the Council of Nicaea lasted to see that written dogmas frequently failed to content partisans at odds with those controversies.

However, no canon lawyer would argue that, because there was disagreement about the Arian controversy after the Council of Nicaea, that the Nicaean creed is a “living creed” that may be adapted to the arbitrary opinions of subsequent bishops. Instead, the Nicaean creed said something. Even if contemporary Arians might not have been persuaded, it was the responsibility of future canon lawyers and theologians to exactly figure out the meaning of those words and enforce them. Fast forwarding to the 20th century, for this reason, the Second Vatican Council won’t be fully appreciated until long after the death of its partisans so that canon-law jurists may impartially read and interpret the documents that Vatican II produced without having to worry about the debates that generated those documents (and which those documents resolve) still being a matter of living memory.

When one takes a historical view of legal systems, that people disagree with what a law says within the generation in which that law was put to ink is to be expected. That disagreement certainly does not imply that the written law has no meaning, it only means that jurists of subsequent generations need to be cautious about how they interpret that law. Partisans may disagree about what words say, but that does not absolve jurists of their duty to pin down what the written words of law mean and imply. Ultimately, I don’t think that disagreement does not give warrant to the introduction of a jurists’ arbitrary views into those words.

In another article at Vox, Ezra Klein has argued that Mr. Gorsuch is “is an extremely conservative judge at a moment when an extremely conservative judge makes a mockery of the popular will.” However, the popular will is not an element of law and should have no place in a jurists’ reading of the law. Popular will has other places to express itself in the political system, from voluntary associations to the election of Congress. Indeed, that the House of Representatives, which is probably that portion of the federal government that best reflects the popular will of the American people, is overwhelmingly Republican is evidence that the popular will desire a Supreme-Court nominee who, in Mr. Klein reckoning, is “extremely conservative”! Of course, we needn’t forget that Mr. Klein had written, back in October, that “Hillary Clinton crushed Donald Trump in the most effective series of debate performances in modern political history.” So maybe Mr. Klein should be taking a hiatus about talking about the popular will of the American people during the Trump Administration.

As far as I can see, constitutional conservatives might be the closest things to true liberals in American politics today and best vehicle for advancing the general welfare. They understand the rule of law and the primacy of the abstract. They are well-read in the intellectual fonts that influenced the American Founders, including John Locke, Montesquieu, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke, and whose wisdom still provides the intellectual foundation for any free society today. I have once been skeptically of many of their views on the powers of the presidency, which at time seem quasi-monarchical, but I have since been convinced by Eric Nelson’s book, The Royalist Revolution, that those views are in-line with the Founders’ ideas for the executive branch.

Those intellectual fonts, as well as the American Founders, had a confidence that, once broken free from monarchical privilege, that the wisdom of common people could secure the felicity of their society. However, they also understood that liberty cannot exist outside of the rule of law. Thankfully, breaking free of monarchical privilege does not imply the breaking of the rule of law, and constitutional conservatives are aware of that. In a world where only the dose makes the poison, constitutional conservatives have a proper skepticism of experts granted privilege that has turned into an excessive populism in the Western world today.

03/17/2017

Marcus Aurelius was the perfect man, says Renan. Yes; the great emperor was a perfect man. But how intolerable were the endless claims upon him! He staggered under the burden of the empire. He was conscious how inadequate one man was to bear the weight of that Titan and too vast orb.

-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

Today is the anniversary of the death of Marcus Aurelius. On March 17, 180 A.D., Marcus died while on campaign in modern Vienna, perhaps of the Antonine Plague. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon provides the following description of the emperor

The mildness of Marcus, which the rigid discipline of the Stoics was unable to eradicate, formed, at the same time, the most amiable and the only defective part of his character. His excellent understanding was often deceived by the unsuspecting goodness of his heart. Artful men who study the passions of princes and conceal their own approached his person in the disguise of philosophic sanctity, and acquired riches and honors by affecting to despise them. His excessive indulgence to his brother, his wife, and his son exceeded the bounds of private virtues and became a public injury by the example and consequences of their vices.

One of the best pieces of historical evidence for Marcus Aurelius’ benevolent nature was that he actually shared the principate with Lucius Verus until the latter’s death in 169. For most cases, garbing two men in the imperial purple was tantamount to a death-sentence for the weaker of the two. Caracella and Geta became co-emperors in 209, only to have Caracella murder Geta in 211. Diocletian hoped to peacefully transfer the empire to Constantius Chlorus and Galerius in 305, yet his tetrarchy soon unraveled into a Hobbesian war of all tetrarchs against all tetrarchs. Maximian, Maximinius II, Maxentius, and Licinius were all purple-clad casualties of the series of wars that finally led to Constantine becoming sole emperor in 325. Despite being the favored of the two, Marcus never eliminated Lucius from the scene, and that is a benevolent act quite unique in the cloak-and-dagger world of Roman politics.

Of course, whatever may have been Marcus Aurelius’ character, the emperor is best remembered for the philosophical thoughts, all addressed Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν-to himself, that he wrote down and that have been passed down to posterity as The Meditations. He fascinates because no where in his philosophy is there a hint of academics lecturing birds to fly. Instead, The Meditations clearly carry the solemnity and wisdom of a man simply trying to figure life out for himself, and for himself alone. Here are some of my own favorite thoughts:

“Say to yourself at the start of the day, I shall meet with meddling, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, and unsociable people. They are subject to all those defects because they have no knowledge of good and bad. But I, who have observed the nature of the good, and seen that it is the right; and of the bad, and seen that it is wrong; and of the wrongdoer himself, and seen that his nature is akin to my own—not because he is of the same blood and seed, but because he shares as I do in mind and thus in a portion of the divine—I, then, can neither be harmed by these people, nor become angry with one who is akin to me, nor can I hate him, for we have come into being to work together, like feet, hands, eyelids, or the two rows of teeth in our upper and lower jaws. To work against one another is therefore contrary to nature; and to be angry with one person and turn away from him is surely to work against him.” -II.1

“As are your habitual conceptions, so will your mind be also; for the soul takes its colouring from its conceptions” - V.16

“’In former days, at whatever moment they caught me, I was a man who was blessed by good fortune.’ But the person who is blessed by good fortune is the one who has assigned a good lot to himself, and a good lot consists of this: good dispositions of the soul, good impulses, good actions.” -V.37

“What does my ruling centre mean to me, and what use am I presently making of it, and to what end am I employing it? Is it devoid of reason? Is it detached and severed from sociability? Or is it so fused and blended with my poor flesh as to move at one with it?” -X.24

“The properties of the rational soul are these: it sees itself, it articulates itself, it shapes itself according to its will, it reaps for itself the fruit it produces (in contrast to the fruits of plants and their counterparts in the animal kingdom, which are harvested by others), and it achieves its proper end, wherever the boundaries of its life may be set” -XI.1.